Manual turn off after system restore

[AnnieMS]

I had to do a system restore via recovery console for a refusal to boot into windows for a "missing hal". Now when I shut down I get a message that I can turn off the computer rather than an automatic shutoff. I seem to remember from years ago there was a place to choose automatic vs manual turn off [who knows what windows os that was].

Is there a place in Windows XP where I can choose automatic vs manual turn off?

I don't know if it's related, but during the trial and error to get windows to boot one of the things I tried first was rebuilding the boot.ini, which has left me w/ two lines under {operating systems} in the boot.ini file where before there was one. Both point to the same boot partition, but I get a boot menu choice on start up.

[iamtheky]

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/810903

[AnnieMS]

Thanks iamtheky for the link.

I checked device manager and both ACPI processor and Standard were listed. ACPI was disabled w/ no drivers installed. Standard was working ok. Under plug n play w/ hidden devices checked neither ACPI driver nor nt apm/legacy support were listed. I didn't spot anything in the BIOS relating to acpi or apm and there was nothing in my handwritten notes on the BIOS settings done long time back.

The dell 380 has a hyperthreading, 3ghz pentium 4. I thought it was acpi capable, bit it's not listed in my dell 380 info table. I'll have to dig thru notes. The dell also has a raid 1. I've come across a couple of things I wouldn't expect that don't coexist w/ raid 1. Don't know if acpi was one.

I'm intending to take down the raid and reformat/reinstall as soon as I can get all the preliminaries done. Since figuring this shut down looks time-intensive, I'm just going to turn off the computer manually in the meantime.

I think it was windows for workgroups 3.1 I was thinking of as far as configuring for automatic vs manual shutdown. At least, I remembered that I edited autoexec.bat to automatically boot into windows from dos and I think you could configure somewhere so that when you exited windows the computer turned off. That automatic turn off might have been win98, but I spent most of my short time w/ win98 in dos trying to get into windows.

[GrofLuigi]

AnnieMS,

Start from item 5e. in the article to regain automatic power off. But you should rectify the problem as soon as possible. It seems to me there is pretty big mess going on and the best course of action would be to reinstall OS from scratch.

GL

[VideoRipper]

In the past (although I can't remember what version of Windows it was) I could

get things working again by re-installing the motherboard's chipset drivers.

Greetz,

Peter.

[AnnieMS]

Thanks everyone,

I'll try starting from 5e. There were so many layers to that article I got confused. After my long experience w/ win3.1 it sort of seemed normal to see the message "it is now safe to turn off the computer" - but it is a pain.

I'm planning on reinstalling/reformatting, but I'm trying to get my data backed up to cd before starting that. Only windows + optical burning has always been unreliable and it's being uncooperative and nero's not helping. I snarl and rant whenever I read "and backup up your data" before doing this or that. Ha! Have I got stories to tell!

Last time I reformatted/reinstalled the dell [well, mostly I watched] and backed up to the ext hd, when I went to put back my data the external was just dead. And the blinkin company didn't stock controllers. If I hadn't had priority stuff on dvd's I'd have lost all. I think flash drives are very reliable and this time of year is a good time to look. Last I time I checked it was still too expensive for me to use as backup, but I think I'll check again just in case prices have dropped dramatically for some reason.

I also need to run hardware tests before I proceed and read a lot of stuff because I want to take down the raid and buy/install a decent optical burner and maybe switch from 1394 to s800. But not if the mb, processor, hds have problems. Unfortunately, I'm slow. But I can try to get the computer to turn off by reading that article again and starting at 5e.

[AnnieMS]

GrofLuigi

I followed the instructions starting at 5e and found the nt apm/legacy support under common hardware and clicked on all the next's to finish. The hardware wizard said the device was installed but it couldnt' initialize the device driver and I got the same message about "safe to turn off" when I shut down and had to manually turn the computer off. When I booted up and logged back on nt apm/legacy interface node was now in device manager, but it had a yellow question mark. I checked properties and it says the same thing "cannot initialize drivers for this device code 37"

The drive files details window shows green checkmarks next to hal.dll, ntoskrnl.exe, and ntkmipa.exe. I know drivers load before they are initialized, but I haven't been able to find out via googling or topekaing how drivers are initialized.

The technet articles advice is to uninstall the driver, and then Scan for hardware changes to reinstall or upgrade the driver, but I don't think I'll try that on my own. The advice wasn't specific to apm.

I can't see anything in the BIOS about apm or apci.

Videoripper,

I have no idea how to reinstall the mobo's chip drivers. Do you do that via device manager > view hidden devices > system and that list of Itel etc's? I don't see anything related to power, and again, I don't want to experiment w/ chip set drivers at my level of knowledge. Uninstalling/reinstalling the cdrom via device manager is about my level.

[VideoRipper]

No, you just go the website of the motherboard's manuafacturer, go to their

"Support" and/or "Download"-section and find the installer-package for your

motherboard (which most of the time is just an executable).

You then run the installer, do a reboot and that should be it (more or less)

For the Dell 380, you should have a look at this page.

Greetz,

Peter.

[GrofLuigi]

AnnieMS, that's The Big Mess - that both ACPI processor and Standard PC are installed. I guess the presence of ACPI is preventing NT APM/Legacy interface from working (NT APM sees that ACPI is installed and aborts its own initialization). <- just a guess.

I recommend the absolutely first thing to do is to backup your data, since I think this could break up any time. Only then keep on trying to fix it, but way better would be reformat and reinstall.

If this is your model, then I think this is your chipset (I'm not sure about the X). Just don't install the Intel® Matrix Storage Manager driver yet.

GL

[GrofLuigi]

AnnieMS, since I have problems editing my posts, I'll add that the driver you need to download is Intel® Chipset Software

Installation Utility

GL

[VideoRipper]

AnnieMS, since I have problems editing my posts,

Don't worry, I've got all sorts of problems with MSFN since they've upgraded the forum.

Just press the "Edit"-button twice and you'll get there

Greetz,

Peter.

[AnnieMS]

Thanks Grofluigi & Videoripper,

My new external hdd came so I'll back up everything to it as soon as I partition/format the new drive. I've been trying for months to backup up my data via optical media and finally got some discs burned and then the system restore and I'm back to Nero crashing or "failure to burn" = coasters.

I kinda thought if it was a standard/APM computer it wouldn't have ACPI listed whether or not it had drivers installed. My only guess was that RAID 1 doesn't do ACPI so the ACPI was disabled but installed. If ACPI & standard are incompatible how did ACPI get listed or how did standard gets its drivers installed and enabled by a system restore? Is there some sort of self-repair mechanism that BIOS, hal or Windows has that would do that? It was a recent restore and yet things like my scanner and camera drivers that have been on there since forever had to be reinstalled. Does that suggest a switch from acpi to apm or just a messed-up restore?

My computer is the Dell 380 precision workstation, but it could be configured w/ different processors, etc. Mine has the hyperthreading, 3GHz P4 [not the dual core option] & 512 memory, I think the DDR2 533MHz ECC option. I tried letting dell analyze my system and tell me what memory I had [i want to add memory], but you have to use IE, which I did, and it didn't work. The Dell mobo is 0G9322. I'm pretty sure the chipset is the 955X [Lakeport]- I don't think there were other chipset options. The RAID controller is 82801GR/GH per device manager.

I've been trying to figure out if my computer should be standard or ACPI. My much older Sony laptop [2002] is ACPI so I would think the dell from 2005 would be also. dell doesn't provide a mobo manual & I don't see it in any of my specs sheets. It may be on their web "manual" or in the specs sheets and I just don't get it. All I could find under Advanced Features was

LegacySelect technology control offers legacy-full, legacy-reduced, or legacy-free solutions based on common platforms, hard-drive images, and help desk procedures. Control is provided to the administrator through system setup, Dell OpenManage™ IT Assistant, or Dell™ custom factory integration.

LegacySelect allows administrators to electronically activate or deactivate connectors and media devices that include serial and USB connectors, a parallel connector, a floppy drive, PCI slots, and a PS/2 mouse. Connectors and media devices that are deactivated make resources available. You must restart the computer to effect the changes.

Does this mean the setting should be Standard and I should uninstall the non-working ACPI? Or did LegacySelect get turned on by accident?

As per Videoripper, the first thing I need to do is save my data. Then I'd like to try installing the chipset drivers/figuring out the apci/apm problem. Since I want to take down the raid 1 I have to do a reformat/reinstall anyway, but first if possible I'd like to figure out what went wrong or at least what is wrong now.

[GrofLuigi]

As far as I remember, the only time it matters whether you have ACPI enabled in BIOS is before (or during) the installation of the OS. If you change it afterwards, it won't matter.

So you need to sort that out before the install.

And yes, reinstallation of (many) drivers indicates the computer type changed.

For any computer less than 10 years old, the preferred type should be ACPI (except in rare cases when there are problems with it or the OS, but those are really rare).

I don't know anything about LegacySelect technology. From the Google search, it's either another name for "Integrated peripherals" BIOS menu or a remote management tool (inside Windows?). In either case it shouldn't afect ACPI (but I might be wrong).

GL

[AnnieMS]

Thanks GrofLuigi,

The dell is backing up and I should have it done this afternoon.

It doesn't matter if ACPI is changed in the BIOS after the OS is installed - because the OS will ignore the BIOS setting for its own acpi setting once it loads? So what I do is install the drivers for acpi in device manager? Have the winxp OS install disc in the drive and let Windows search the disk, the disc & for updated drivers via internet? Disable APM first? Or see If windows can find the acpi drivers and then disable apm?

From what I could understand - guess really - I think APM vs ACPI is required for LegacySelect. APM has a "layered" [Wikipedia] approach pertaining to device drivers that allows administrators to turn off serial, parallel etc legacy hardware that I don't think ACPI has. The dell 380 is a workstation meant for businesses and in that setting APM may have advantages over ACPI. But I have no idea how APM got enabled. I'll have to see if I can find more on LegacySelect and see how it gets selected.

I don't think the dell ever got the BIOS update [improve OROM Initialization] since it was released 2/2/07. It should have gotten the Intel Chipset Software Installation Utility released on 4/14/2006, but I can't be sure it did. So after I hopefully get acpi enabled and apm disabled I should do the BIOS and chipset updates?

[GrofLuigi]

Acpi enabled <- make sure it's in BIOS. Do everything you can in LegacySelect that seems logical. I think you might (in this case) consider APM as "lack of ACPI" so try to be guided by that. But if there are options for enabling both ACPI and APM, enable them both (they are not exclusive).

For that PC, I think XP setup will select ACPI Uniprocessor PC.

Doesn't matter what's in the OS, hopefully it will be a clean install (after format/wipe the HDD) and only ACPI HAL will be present (XP will install it, you don't need to do anything; chipset drivers won't make a difference). If it's not a clean install, there's a big chance the Mess will propagate.

Don't worry too much, just a clean install will be fine. After that, the chipset driver (utility). Then, nVidia drivers. Then, other drivers...

GL